In Case of Emergency, Break Here
by AliCat713
Summary: Maggots and flies, pain and healing.  Post DD, no deliberate spoilers I assume in this story that she survives.


**Rating:** T? A weak T, I think.  
**Spoilers: **None, although I do assume in this that Sara survives.  
**Disclaimer: **The characters on CSI are not mine. This story is.  
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Flecks of dust danced in the weak morning light.

He lay awake, listening to her steady, deep inhalations, counting the heavy seconds until she exhaled yet again.

The sunlight filtered through the drawn shades; bamboo, because Sara liked bamboo, because she said that they would block out the light, because it was abundant and biodegradable. Because she needed the sunlight blocked from their bedroom in order to sleep; because she was healing, and she needed her rest, and he was careful to give her what she needed now. A glass of water and acetaminophen, magazines to pass the time, and the television remote were always within reach.

But the shades didn't block out the light. Not completely. In the joyless dance of dust (_made of human skin_, he thought, _90 of dust is human skin_) he always finds negation; he had to clamp down on this feeling quickly before he thought of death again.

He turned on his side and, in the slanted morning light, he traced her features with his eyes, not daring to disturb her slumber through physical contact. _She's always been a light sleeper._ Pausing briefly on the deep tissue bruising on her shoulders, bare but for the pale line of camisole strap pushed up near her neck, he set about memorizing the shapes of the mottled discolorations. He thought perhaps he was looking in order to divine some meaning from her suffering; a sort of tasseography of her body from the subconscious pictures the bruises created as he stared.

Like tea leaves against pure china, her skin bore mute testimony to being used.

His eyes moved lower, to the hint of waist peeking from beneath the coverlet. There, too, was evidence of her trial; the scratches, raw flesh, and scabs that, were he her friend or a family member and not her lover, he could attempt to kiss away without guilt.

But, being her lover, he felt the guilt of her suffering deeply.

As always during these sleepless days, his thoughts turned to her ordeal in the desert. Somehow during the 37 hours of her abandonment, their roles had reversed. He had become the one who needed desperately to talk about feelings, the insomniac; and Sara was closed to him, now sleeping the hard, unrelenting sleep of the…

His mind was constantly turning on him, producing these morbid faux pas; again, he almost thought "dead". He'd thought it plenty of times during those 37 hours; thought about her lying crushed beneath two tons of industrial steel and alloys, thought about her dying of thirst, or exposure, or – the worst – thought about coyotes tearing at her outstretched hand, how it would torture her into unconsciousness. Thought about her bleeding out, about ruptured internal organs; her spleen, maybe, or her liver, splitting like a rotten tomato and killing her slowly.

Thought about her drowning in four inches of rain in the desert, and how helpless she would be to prevent it.

And how it would be his fault.

He'd gone so far as to imagine which indigenous species of insect would be burrowing in her first. He'd drawn charts in his mind of the stages of predation based on her exposure and estimated time of death. He knew exactly which beetles would arrive first to begin tearing at her skin, which larvae would likely develop first by the time they found her.

This is what kept him awake at night: part of him had given up on her. Some niggling worm of doubt had eaten into his subconscious and betrayed his outward struggle to save her. Some small part of his mind was ready to retreat, prepared to build a shelter from his thoughts where he could resist the emotional crippling that came with losing her.

The sigh and shift of Sara's duvet slipping off of her thighs interrupted his thoughts.

Carefully, so as not to come into actual contact with her skin, he pulled the soft blanket up again, letting it settle against her raw, bruised hips. He was always careful not to wake her; the doctors affirmed her need for sleep whenever he called them concerned because of her deep slumber. Skimming his hand lightly above the protective coverlet, he returned to his thoughts.

_Giving up._

At some point, he'd already come to accept that she was dead and _she never had_. True to form, she had held to her innate strength and endured, while he betrayed not only their well-hidden secret, but also her trust in his faith in her. In them. Some part of him had already given up on her, drawing his insect timelines carefully across the white matter of his mind, mentally carving his unfaithfulness in stark black lettering to torment him during the ensuing hours of their lives.

Sara may have the physical brokenness from her ordeal, but he was the one suffering from the post traumatic stress.

He knew this, of course. He knew the signs; the sleeplessness, the lack of appetite, the involuntary startle at a door being closed or a car speeding past, the fear of strangers. He found himself babbling to a clerk in the grocery market Sara insisted upon using one day about blowflies, and how he had to check Sara's ears and nose as she was loaded into the ambulance to ascertain whether or not they'd set up home in her body yet.

He just wanted so desperately to _talk_ to someone about it.

"_You see,"_ he'd almost enthused, _"Calliphoridae are drawn to natural orifices, such as the mouth, eyes, nose, ears. The females lay their eggs in these openings, whereas Sarcophagidae – the flesh eaters - will place their_ _**larva**__ there instead. Ingenious really, how insects are such an integral part of the ends of our lives. It doesn't matter who you are; you're going to have blowfly larvae eating away at your eyes, your sinuses, your insides, when you die."_

When he'd discovered the look of panicked horror in the acne-scarred teen's eyes, he'd snapped his mouth closed and left the store. For all he knew, Sara's tofu and mangoes were probably still sitting on that counter; he had never returned to the store to find out, preferring instead to drive across town to another one.

She had become a symbol of his failure; not because of her, or her actions, or her pain. She just was. He had failed her, in every way, and he couldn't cope normally - whatever that meant - anymore. He couldn't connect with her during her waking hours, what few there were now, and he certainly couldn't connect with her as she slept.

Although he did try, in his own way, to connect with her.

He had begun this insomniac ritual of tracing her features the night she was released from the hospital. Over and over again, as the pain medicine held her dormant, he glided the tips of his fingers across her body; the coroner-that-was within him insisted on naming the number of ways in which she could have died with a snap _here_ or more pressure _there. _He cried openly that night for the first time since the scorching day they found her; fitting his body against hers, he rocked himself to sleep, skin to skin with her for the last time.

Sara didn't know.

As the days crept on, and Sara no longer took the heavy doses of pain medicine, he stopped touching her skin and instead allowed his fingers to hover just above her.

He was so afraid that she would wake and witness his brokenness in action; he had to be so careful.

He'd hold his hand just an inch or two above her body; it was difficult, but he was a man of self-control, after all. Beginning at her hairline, he would slowly slide his hand down over her somnolent body, over features he knew even in his dreams. So close, but not touching. As he moved over her, carefully not coming into contact with her sweet skin, he would focus his attention on her ailments; dislocated shoulder, broken collarbone, fracture of the deltoid, scraped and bruised forearm. And her hands, God in heaven, her beautiful hands: nails torn and fingers scraped raw from scrabbling at the desert hardpan.

How could he touch her there? How could he ever wrap himself against her, fitting himself to her in that way that completed him _ever_ again?

So he would glide his palm over her side, or her chest; and oh, the _pain_ of it all. The heart-rending, chest-bursting torture of it all, that he couldn't heal her or stitch up his own broken, bleeding heart. That he was too afraid to touch her in any way because of his own decomposing heart.

_Blowflies_, he thought. _Blowflies and maggots in my heart._

A single common housefly, _Musca domestica_, slipped into their home when he carried her in from the car. He wondered, irrationally, if it had been following her the whole time, waiting to land and lay its eggs. It was absurd, untenable; and yet it preoccupied his waking hours. Days had passed, and even though he knew intellectually that the common housefly was no threat to her, he'd set up this watch over her intending to stop the bastard from getting anywhere near her.

He could breathe easy leaving her for a few minutes at a time when she was awake, but the thought of leaving her asleep at the mercy of such a clear threat to her wellbeing was horrifying.

He'd drifted off to sleep that first night, curled against her side, unconcerned about the fly. He'd realized his mistake when he woke later to the sound of high-pitched buzzing near his ear. He'd nearly screamed when the fly alighted not only on him, but on Sara as well. He'd pressed his fist against his teeth to hold in his unreasoning terror; had the fly been attracted by his rotten, betraying heart?

And so every night, every day, he checked her for signs of habitation. _25 days_, he kept reminding himself; _the housefly lives only 25 days. I just have to hold on for 12 more days, just in case, and then, if there are no maggots, I can sleep_.

He had to save Sara. He had to make it up to her, somehow, when all of this, all of her pain, was his fault. So he ignored his body's demands for sleep and kept vigil over her frail, exposed skin.

It was his responsibility to protect her.

_Blowflies and maggots_.

But he hadn't expected that she would save them both.

On his third pass over her body that morning, he found his control wavering. As his fingers inadvertently brushed along her skin, she woke; reaching cautiously down and taking his hand, giving a gentle squeeze, she saved him:

"Griss. I'm so sorry; I had to throw away your latest issue of Forensic Examiner this morning."

Confused, he opened his mouth to reassure her that really, whatever she did was fine, was just fine, because she was Sara and because everything about her was fine, he checked several times a day to make sure.

"There was a fly in here. It landed on the edge of the nightstand and I just… whacked it. It was pretty messy; I knocked over the water and everything." As she spoke, she reached her hand up from the comforter, seeking the warmth of his skin. She glided her fingers up his arm, across his chest. "I'll get you a new copy, ok? Sorry - about your bug friend."

"Insect," he corrected gently, suppressing the urge to laugh uncontrollably in Sara's sweet, sleepy face. Pressing his hand lightly against hers, making contact with her skin for the first time in so long, he felt lighter, safer.

Sitting there with her hand resting across his heart, he finally felt something besides guilt and fear. Leaning down, pressing his lips to hers, he expanded on his words as best he knew how:

"Flies are insects, sweetheart; but that doesn't matter. They don't really matter." He sighed, the joy of the realization contained in the simple words freeing him, and he continued; "You do."

Smiling sleepily, sweetly, slightly confused and unaware that the flies and maggots eating away at his heart were now dying under her protective hand, she responded, "You do too."

And, finally, his healing began.

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**Author's Note**: Originally written in response to Prompt 14 at **unloveyou**, "I'm awake and you're breathing." This story could not have been finished without the urging of a handful of friends and the beta work of the lovely **mingsmommy**. As usual, if there's anything worth remembering in this, it's due to those who encouraged me. 


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